Travel reservations traditionally involved manual steps, taken by either a travel agent or individual traveler, such as itinerary searching, scheduling, and booking. For example, many travel agents still use cryptic codes to search airline and other types of databases and retrieve thousands of unsorted records. Agents are often tasked to sort through these records and manually select various options. The process becomes particularly difficult when multiple databases are involved for developing complex itineraries, such as reserving multiple flights, hotel, car, and restaurants. In addition to relying on travel agents, customers may check options available from online aggregators, magazines, newspapers.
Not only are travel reservation processes are very cumbersome and inefficient, they also prone to human error. As a result, itineraries often have to be modified. There is often an environmental cost to the overall process in the form of printing and faxing and direct costs of human resources, such as travel agents and customers. Finally, because of inefficiencies, customers are not often presented with the best matches, while options presented by suppliers do not always reach customers that are in greatest need.